‘Us vs. Them’ Fires ‘em Up

Remember the old Buffalo Springfield song, “For What It’s Worth”? It starts out with these lines: “There’s somethin’ happening here/What it is ain’t exactly clear.” Songwriter Stephen Stills was thinking of the anti-Vietnam War protests when he penned those words in 1966, but his poetic rendering of the confusion that accompanies human events also applies to the events of today.

Case in point: George W. Bush vs. Palm Beach County Canvassing Board, et al., which was argued in front of the U.S. Supreme Court on Friday.

Indeed, the issues aren’t merely unclear; they’re so stupefyingly abstruse as to border on medieval theology. But of course, that’s the way judges and lawyers like it. What’s the point, after all, of neo-Greek temples and black robes and no cameras, if not to induce awe-struck feelings on the part of the plebes? Indeed, as he answered a question from a reporter in the post-argument spin cycle, Laurence H. Tribe, lead attorney for the Gore campaign, admitted that “a lot of time was spent on how many angels could dance on the head of that particular pin.”

But the problem with all this legal liturgicalizing is that it doesn’t really solve anything. Popular passions are being raised, not lowered, as the Battle of the Lawyers drags on.

Indeed, watching the crowd gathered in front of the court on Friday morning, listening to all the chants and counter-chants, I was tempted to yell out, “We got spirit, yes we do!”, and whatever other cheers I could remember from high school. And that’s a reminder that a big part of politics, like sports, is mindlessly hormonalized us-against-them.

But the real significance of the crowds was not nostalgic, but rather ironic, because the two parties, and all their activists, have switched sides on just about every issue involved in this case. For the past half-century, the Republicans have been the party of “states’ rights,” although of course, prior to the 1950s, the Democrats were the party of states’ rights.

Songwriter Stills captured the seeming randomness of advocacy: “A thousand people in the street/Singing songs and carrying signs/Mostly say, hooray for our side.”

So who will be cheering after the Supreme Court rules? Probably neither side, because the immediate impact of this case, no matter how it is decided, is negligible. If the court rules for plaintiff Bush, then all that would happen is that the votes that the Florida Supreme Court allowed to be counted would be uncounted, and Bush’s victory margin would rise from 527 to 930.

But of course, that’s hardly the end of the case--or the cases. On Friday, a judge in Tallahassee, having received 1.1 million ballots trucked up from Palm Beach and Miami-Dade counties, was stuck trying to figure out what to do with them. Democrats, meanwhile were pressing their cases in two counties, Seminole and Martin, trying to invalidate thousands of Bush votes on a technicality--although, of course, technicalities have been the name of the game for the last month.

At the same time, Republicans got some big-bore ammunition for their cause. An investigation by the Miami Herald found that at least 445 felons voted illegally, under Florida law, on Nov. 7. The paper reviewed a half-million ballots cast in 12 counties, representing about 8% of the Sunshine State’s population. Extrapolating to all 67 counties, these data suggest that perhaps 5,000 felons voted; about 75% of them are registered Democrats.

For most Americans, the good news is that a new president will be inaugurated on Jan. 20. (Although just in case it happens, one should remember that “Hastert,” as in Speaker of the House-turned-President Dennis Hastert, rhymes with “mastered.”) But for some Americans--the ones marching through the streets and through the legal suites, mostly saying, as Stills put it, hooray for our side--the end of this legalkampf will be bad news.

Remember another Vietnam icon, Col. Kilgore, the character played by Robert Duvall in the 1979 Francis Ford Coppola film “Apocalypse Now”? Having led an American helicopter attack on a Vietnamese village, the war-crazed Kilgore surveys all the destruction and says sadly, “Someday this war’s gonna end.”

Fortunately for the stateside Kilgores, the ’04 political battle will start up soon. And who knows? Maybe the legal battle will never end.